By Amir Netz, Technical Fellow and Mey Meenakshisundaram, Product Manager
Gantt charts are indispensable part of project management portfolio. Project Managers and executives love Gantt charts, since they visually show in a very effective at-a-glance way, the overall time line of the project, the current status & progress (or lack thereof) along with the assignment at considerable details.
Managing projects successfully is not easy as any reasonable size project has lots of moving pieces & people. So every project plan begins with a Gantt chart. As a project manager, putting together a Gantt will take you half way through the project and the other half is the easy part.
For those of you, who are not Gantt literate, it’s a type of bar chart to illustrate a schedule with time axis. When you put Gantt chart along with other insightful charts in an interactive canvas, you can manage your project in whole new way. In Power BI as visuals interact with each other, you can look at your resource allocation, task completion, remaining tasks in different perspective and get a firm handle on the future. Power BI would become your compass to navigate your project ship to the success land.
Gantt charts in Power BI would also open up the communication with your team, stakeholders and partners effortlessly and keep them in sync. There are grave statistics available in project management literature about project failures due to breakdown in communication and with this visual in Power BI, it will be a thing of the past.
With this custom visual, you can specify the Tasks, Start Date, Duration and %Completion for rendering them as Gantt. Please note that the %Completion expects a decimal value ( for example 0.85 means 85%) and Start Date , a date field and not a date hierarchy.
You can also control the color of the bar with a Legend. You can use any relevant field from your project as Legend for example task type for this purpose. Additionally, you can also specify the resource field, which would be listed next the bar in the Gantt.
To use, simply download the Gantt chart from the Visuals gallery and import it to your Power BI report and use it. Here is a sample file for you to try it out this new custom visual in Power BI .
As usual, we can’t wait to hear your thoughts and your ideas for improvements.
Enjoy!